CHICAGO — Among the 58 artworks in Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, three stoneware vessels, drawn from her Mama Pot series, exemplify how Duckworth’s work defies art critical hierarchies. These pots evoke domestic uses associated with pottery yet resemble ancient ritual ceramics. Lacking such cultural backstories, they emerge as self-contained meditative sculptures hinting at fragility, with curvaceous shells disrupted by roughly serrated rims, web-like craquelure, and biomorphic slits and crevices.
Life as a Unity — part of the program Art Design Chicago, spotlighting the city’s artistic heritage — focuses on Duckworth’s mid-to-late career zenith. Through semiabstract objects and imaginative statuary in stoneware, porcelain, and bronze, and prodigious wall-sized public murals, her art channels the earth’s imperceptible, mutating forces: storm systems, lake currents, tectonic plates, cloud and wind patterns. Duckworth was inspired by Modernist forerunners like Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore. She subtly integrated those influences so that her mostly monochromatic sculptures — transmuting natural phenomena into refined forms — convey a disarming straightforwardness despite wide-ranging scales, intricacies, and configurations.
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That forthright creativity has biographical roots. Born in 1919 to a privileged family in Hamburg, Duckworth could not study art in Nazi Germany due to her father’s Jewish heritage, so she emigrated to England. As her family’s fortunes declined, she endured German aerial bombardment while living near Liverpool, and participated in prolonged psychoanalysis, settling on a métier in clay and ceramics at Central School of Arts and Crafts London in the mid-1950s.
In 1964 she was invited to a year-long residency at the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios and moved to Chicago permanently one year later, maintaining home studios in the city and remaining creatively productive there for many decades. (She died in 2009 at age 90.)
Life as a Unity spotlights the intellectual foment that the artist experienced in and around the University of Chicago, where she was drawn to aerial photography and geophysical mapping, and where she befriended the meteorologist Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita who was revolutionizing the measurement of downcasts and tornados. Fujita’s black and white photographic slides of these phenomena are included in the show, along with archival press clippings that chart Duckworth’s early involvement in the region’s environmental movement.
These interdisciplinary interests provide context for Duckworth’s career-defining public murals, “Earth, Water, Sky” (1968–69), commissioned for the campus’s Henry Hinds Laboratory for Geophysical Sciences, and the enormous clay-tile mural “Clouds Over Lake Michigan” (1976), imagining an aerial view of what Duckworth called “a pre-Columbian” Chicago.
The high points in Life as a Unity are large wall sculptures created in conjunction with those public murals. Abounding in mesmeric lines, scalloped forms, and lustrous glazes that conjure wind erosion, cloud species, watersheds, and continental shelving, these works double as the exhibition’s connective tissue, as Duckworth moved between small-scale, gnomic cup and blade porcelain figures and mid-sized sculptures and statuary. Some suggest bird-and-humanoid transfigurations, others resemble flat stone and slate formations on seabeds. Still others are hermetic, and even forbidding. One wall frieze looks like a cavernous maw flanked by horizontally aligned tusks.
Duckworth’s legacy is an unwavering commitment to clay as a medium that expanded beyond the potter’s craft. “Everything is clay,” she famously declared. As we accelerate environmental ruin, her art points to how that medium’s universalizing plasticity or materiality, alongside what she termed “Earth’s fragility,” reminds us of our bond with the nonhuman. An understated healing comes from that difficult retrieval, as if that collective malleability and rootedness can restore a primal consciousness that she doubtlessly found reinforced by her lifelong reading of Rainer Maria Rilke — whose poem “Gravitation” (1924) parallels the strange allure of Duckworth’s sculpture: “Centre, extricating yourself/ from everything […] Stander, through whom the earth’s pull/ hurtles like drink through thirst” [and] “Sleeper, from whom, as though/ from a couching cloud, it falls/ in large and liberal rain.”
Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity continues at the Smart Museum of Art (The University of Chicago, 5550 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through February 4. The exhibition was curated by Laura Steward, curator of Public Art.
Source: Hyperallergic.com